A local print magazine had, for a while, on their web site, a notice that
read something to the effect of "We do not have a web presence at this
time because we haven't figured out how to make money off of it yet."
I'm paraphrasing a bit, but not much. So I read this, and think about it
for a bit, and it's true. Or it seems true. There are all these web
publications going out of business or firing staff because the web
publishing world does not seem lucrative. Meanwhile, print publications
are still doing ok, but only because of ads, and we all know that banner
ads don't really work online. So yes, it makes sense that this
publication wouldn't want to put itselve online.

More telling is that the publication that I had in mind is free, so there
is no revenue coming in from the actual print version to fund any sort of
online version. And I really have no answer for this. But what I really
wish is that everything did not have to be a commercial venture. Or
rather, that the goal wasn't to make gobs and gobs of money. That the goal
of some business project could just be to make enough money to produce
whatever it was that had to be produced and to move on. There's this
whole publishing thing that's going on right now, right? Or at least
that's starting to go on.

We've got Dave Eggers funding Neal Pollack's first book. If this book
does well, and if Pollack pockets the entirety of the profits from the
book as they claim he will, then he can make off with a pretty hefty sum
of money. Now, if he takes half of what he makes, which is a hefty sum in
its own right, and pockets it, and takes the other half and puts it into
publishing two more books which also do as well as his book does, then we
will have the start of something wonderful. We will have people who will
be making some amount of money for the work that they're doing, but not an
isane amount of money. And we will have projects that are being funded
because someone feels that they need to get funded, because these projects
(books) need to get published. Not because they will be best-sellers, but
because they will be sellers. Because.

I'm making no sense, which is unfortunate, because I believe that my heart
is in the right place. In writing these words, I am getting increasingly
agitated, becuase I myself am thinking "How can I go off and get a job
where I can make lots of money so I will not have to worry about
money?" when instead I should be asking myself "What can I do that will
pay me just enough money but that will make me and a lot of other people
happy?" Because really, if everyone went through their lives thinking of
ways to make themselves and other people happy, then the world
would be a friendlier place.

My friend's coworkers began to hug him on the way out of the office when
he told them he was quitting. "What a wonderful place the world would be
if every work day ended with a hug!" he exclaimed (though again I am
paraphrasing because I am lazy and do not wish to quote him
directly). Imagine if the business world operated on the notion of One
Big Hug. What would this mean for the world? I'm not exactly
sure? Would it mean that the GAP would take some surplus pants and give
them away, just because it was a nice thing to do? Would it mean that
people would actually run companies because they wanted to, not because
they were going to make "mad money." Would it mean that there would be
some way to fund the artists of the world without having to have them just
through hoops for grants and the like?

Again, I'm talking nonsense. I think I just want a hug.

...

I also woke up the other morning, panicked, because I realized that I did
not feed the cats, and even more frightening was that I didn't know where
the catfood was, nor did I know if I even had a bowl for the catfood. As
I drifted into consciousness it slowly dawned on me. I don't have a cat.